WHEN we speak of home, our words stray to whimsy. Home is where the heart is. There is no place like home. It's a man's castle, and any place you lay your hat.

But the great Australian dream - or should that be fetish - seems fixated on the free-standing home on the cherished quarter-acre block. It's a fixation that leaves us reluctant to consider other kinds of places where we might park our imaginations, along with our families, our possessions and our ambitions for the cities we live in. In a land of wide-open spaces there is room for a lot, but not often a place for other words to replace all those notions of home.

Consider the term ''co-operative housing''. Broadly speaking, it describes housing developments in which people pool their resources to design and build projects that meet their lifestyle and financial needs, consuming less space and fewer resources, while offering a fresh choice that fits somewhere in between the big suburban block and the tiny city apartment.

It's not an easy concept to get off the ground. You need the money and you need the land, both need to be managed effectively, and you need a group of people able to stick it out through the various debates and roadblocks that are sure to arise.

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One group in Melbourne, Urban Coup, is four years into its co-op dream, and after four years is still only as far as embarking on its search for the land to build on.

When affordable housing expert Tony Gilmour prepared a report on the subject last year, he found the numbers were tiny when it came to placing co-operative housing in a national context. He found co-ops comprised 10 per cent of the community housing sector, 1.23 per cent of the social housing sector, and just 0.06 per cent of the total housing stock.

Gilmour says in Australia, co-ops are usually confined to social housing. ''They're for low-income people so they don't have capital and obviously the rent they're paying is not that high so it has to be funded by taxpayers,'' he says.

''Overseas you have middle-class people - and in the United States, upper-class people - having housing co-ops and they put the money in and groups of wealthy artists and so on can live together. Here it's largely just seen as a form of social housing. It would be nice to have a bit more diversity in there.''

Gilmour and other experts in the field - such as Geoffrey London, the Victorian government architect - want us to embrace this housing model, which is common in Europe and increasingly in the US, because it offers potential solutions to a range of social and other problems. Yet in Australia the idea of co-operative housing is often regarded with suspicion, when it is regarded at all.

What's in a word? A lot, apparently, when that word is ''co-operative'', which tends to conjure up visions of Nimbin-like collectives of dropouts. In short, co-operative housing has an image problem - more hippie than hip.

''It does and we've been struggling with an alternative term for it,'' London says. ''The reality is that it is just individuals coming together to co-operate - as their own developer, really - to build their own housing and in so doing, forming small community groups. It's a term that's been used internationally for this form of housing.''

Tony Gilmour says there are also other issues with co-op housing beyond the nomenclature. ''The image problem really isn't based on the reality. I went out to visit five co-ops at the end of last year and they're all talking about balance sheets and asset maintenance. They're pretty switched on and contemporary now, they have professionalised, they have changed. One reason why they've not grown faster in Australia is because we've been dominated for many years by the 'office of housing', by housing authorities. They won't really let people have a look-in.''

London dreams of creating a demonstration co-op model for Victoria, but first he might need to confront the stigma that co-op housing seems to attract.

''I'd like to discourage the view of this having anything do with alternative lifestyles. A lot of the old co-operatives of the '70s had a lot to do with everything remaining in group ownership,'' he explains. ''What we're talking about is something that would result in nothing that would be different from the current strata-title development. You own your own unit. There may be some shared property as part of that development, which at the moment in a normal strata title development would include parking areas. You may have a shared tennis court, a swimming pool, whatever.

''A group that comes together may determine what they will own in common - that may include, for example, a small apartment as part of the complex where guests stay over. It could include a small childcare centre, or a shared office space.''

The owners would be ''their own developers'', as London puts it, choosing the site and driving the design.

''There's a gap in the market currently where it's not possible for household consumers to initiate a development of housing other than detached housing. You're relying on the development market to supply. And matching the economic side of it is the design side of it, because this process will allow people to go into a complex of units … that will be more tailor-made for their requirements. By introducing a real design dimension to the process, you've got the chance of a much higher quality outcome.''

In Victoria, there is no example of this concept in the exact form London describes. But there are hybrid models, either completed or in development, that suggest a way forward.

One of the newest developments, Murundaka in Heidelberg Heights, has been home to the residents of 18 units since November 2011. In its original incarnation it was closer to the model London advocates - it was to be half tenants, half owners, all living within a co-operative system. Then the global financial crisis hit, and the Rudd government's stimulus package offered grants for affordable housing projects.

Co-Housing Australia, the group behind the project, accepted the funding and turned Murundaka into a tenants-only complex: to get in, your income has to be at or below a set amount and rent is set at 25 per cent of your income. You also need to share the sustainable-living philosophy of the founders.

Iain Walker, one of the brains behind the project, sees it as an extension of the co-operative housing concept. ''We're … saying if we work together, if we help finance each other, if we share things more, you can reduce your costs and you can reduce your impact on the planet,'' Walker says. ''I'm coming at it from all three aspects - the social, the environmental and the affordable. [There are] all those wonderful benefits of the old, traditional extended family, of the village lifestyle, but in a modern, mainstream capacity.''

Murundaka, far from evoking '70s communes, is modern and rather funky in design. The two blocks of nine units are built around a common meeting place that hosts everything from occasional meals to birthdays to, recently, a wake. There's a vegie patch and a spare room anyone can use for guests. Some residents share cars; others pitch in with babysitting.

It's proved a godsend to residents such as Delphine Laboureau-Ormancey, who lives there with her 19-year-old son. She migrated to Australia 20 years ago and lived mostly in country Victoria. More recently she found herself priced out of the Melbourne rental market. Then she heard about Murandaka.

''It's given me freedom,'' she says. ''It allowed me to change profession. Now that I've got security of housing and rent that I can manage, suddenly it allowed me to leave a job where I was not that happy any more.''

Heidi Lee lives in a three-bedroom apartment with her partner, Chris, and three-month-old daughter Elle. She says everything in their home ''is about 10 to 15 per cent smaller in terms of private space. That 10 or 15 per cent is allocated [in the common space].''

A year in, Lee adores her new surrounds and its green credentials. ''There's lots of natural light, all of the dwellings are north-facing. We've got water-efficient appliances, we've got solar pre-heating on our gas hot water, we've got 14 car parks for 18 units. There's a number of households that don't have cars and we do car-sharing. Delphine and I … share a car and another two people do as well.''

Gilbert Rochecouste, whose company Village Well specialises in the sensitive development of urban spaces, regards Murundaka as among the most innovative co-op-style projects in the country. But he laments Australia's slow embrace of the principles and benefits such communities provide, which he attributes to a failure of education and leadership.

''In terms of the development side, it feels like we're a decade away from where they are in Europe, but I do feel clearly that there is a consumer demand,'' he says. ''People do want other options, apart from living in the suburbs or an apartment in the city. I think you're starting to see a whole generation locked out from purchasing a home.''

He agrees with Geoffrey London that the connotations of the word ''co-operative'' are a large part of the problem. ''That's why we're so far behind. There are so many options in Europe, but we've still got this stigma here. We have to own everything. It goes back to that lifestyle question and we need to reframe that lifestyle question. It's a mindset thing with Australians. We need to shift the mindset.''

Rochecouste believes examples such as Murundaka can help reset the debate. ''We need new models. To be blunt, there's money to be made here … [if you] make it savvy and about lifestyle, make it funky and use all the best technology, and make it fun.''

Another Melbourne development that may go a long way to changing perceptions is still on the drawing board, but closer to the ideal of an owner-driven co-operative housing project. Urban Coup brings together a group of like-minded investors who have spent about four years moving the dream of their self-designed urban apartment complex towards reality.

Founding member Alex Fearnside says it has taken that long to settle on their ''community and vision'', plus resolve all the legal and financial issues. The next step is finding land within 10 kilometres of the CBD. When completed, there will be 30 homes in the development with six of them designated as ''social housing'', the rest owner-occupiers.

Fearnside says the group has also attracted the ''hippie'' label. ''We've encountered that and it's one of the driving forces for the Urban Coup. We want to be on the forefront of the image change,'' he says. ''We're doing this to prove that it works and that it creates a viable and strong community that people want to live in. Then Melbourne has a real example of a different model for development and a different model for living. We don't see enough of it happening in Australia.''

London believes such projects ultimately will be the preserve of the private sector, but he sees a role now for government to set an example by building a demonstration project.

''I can't speak about federal government but certainly we've spoken with a number of people in [state] government and there is interest about pursuing this idea. What we now have to do is convince someone in a government department to assist with producing a demonstration model.

''I'm always optimistic and I think again from responses we've had … I think we're going to be able to do it.''

Housing pioneers lead the charge from the comfort of their own eco-village

MIKE Hill and partner Lorna Pitt were both former local councillors and had seen enough development decisions to make them cynical about the process and the quality of housing that results. So 20 years ago, they used their own money to form the company WestWyck to buy what was formerly the Brunswick West Primary School and turn it into an ''eco-village'' - a green-tinged form of co-operative housing.

It hasn't been easy. When they started out, there were five investors and the group was not entirely settled on what to do with the site. When the financial prospects turned out to be less than hoped for, three of them jumped ship, leaving Hill and Pitt as the sole owners.

Hill and Pitt now live on the site with 34 other residents, all owners of their homes, in a development they say highlights the flaws of other modern urban designs.

''We've tried to design it so people interrelate and interconnect,'' says Hill. ''We believe the last 60 to 70 years of housing development in Western cities, Melbourne being an example of that, is the opposite of that. It's been designed around cars, and designed to cut people off from one another.''

At first, there were reactions like, ''You can't do this sort of thing, it's not the way Australians live''.

But Hill believes attitudes are slowly changing as people seek alternatives to long-established housing options. WestWyck is run by an owners' corporation and there are some rules all owners are expected to follow.

''You can't make decisions about the shared space without dealing with that co-operatively,'' Hill says. ''We have regular meetings. But your individual decisions about your household and how you live are totally yours to make.''